Comments

I don’t deny that a certain level of polarization, coarseness in the way we talk to each other or reflexive presumptions of bad faith can lead us toward Trumpian type rhetoric. But that’s like a gateway drug argument. Sure, it happens with some people. But mostly not. The simple truth is that we can live with our politics being raucous, aggressive and even mean. What kills civic life is not only violence but violent incitement, rhetoric of dehumanization and the politics of aggression and hate that is still largely the exclusive possession of the political right in the United States today.

From this point of view, it is not so much about who is "behind" the act, it is who is walking side by side with it.

If you are a president of the U.S. and you use your bully pulpit to pump conspiratorial lies, it's going to affect some mentally ill to act out violently. That's just reality.

We have freedom of hate speech in this country but I don't think our president should be using that freedom, as it can cause violence when someone with the power of the presidency does so, and I think he should suffer political consequences for doing so.

The question really is how to affect those political consequences on the president in a wise and savvy way rather than just ratcheting up more hate.

As excitement mounts in a runup to a critical election, it's important that we recognize that politics isn't, or shouldn't be, actual warfare

By Ed Kilgore @ NYMag.com, Oct. 25

He talks "then: and now:

[...] We all have our theories of why politics increasingly feels like combat, and who is primarily to blame for the creeping savagery of political rhetoric. Back in 2011, when the tea party movement and its quasi-totalitarian ideology of Constitutional Conservatism appeared to be introducing a new and unforgiving tone in politics, two colleagues and I at The Democratic Strategist website published a memo deploring “politics as warfare,” and noting its ubiquity in the extremist politics of the left and right in other countries.

[....]

In writing those lines, we were thinking of the tea party extremists. But since then “politics as warfare” has become common on both sides of the partisan and ideological barricades [....]

He could cancel the rally, fly back to the White House, and read a sober ten-minute speech from the Oval Office. He could, at least for a moment, behave as a president not a rabble-rouser. https://t.co/ynBGzt4tH8

Flavius, I am not sure that anybody is going to notice the restraint you are calling for. I hear the suggestion of not giving Republicans hairs to split. On the other hand, "liberals" are already the kick dog in this movie. The state of affairs will put any generalizations made in a bad light but one peep through the window of the G.O.P. frat party shows a scene where that is so much popcorn trampled upon on the way to the keg.

I think Scaramucci has the correct angle on this festival of lies. It is all about triggering libtards. That is all Trump was hired to do. If you are a Republican, a Martian, or an Episcopalian who doesn't like that, then you probably didn't start that dislike just after some lefties noticed that some private citizen took the messages seriously.

Since I know you're not a fan of newfangled internet stuff, so that you don't have to delve into Twitter links, I will add that who posted this, Harry Siegel, is Senior Editor @ The Daily Beast and I found it retweeted by Rick Wilson who added the comment that The early 1990s called and they want their video game font back.

The subtext here is the Wall Street bailouts and foreclosure wave. All Democratic leaders essentially supported it. This is why there’s grumbling, but no alternatives. The Democrats have really just started their internal debate over big money. https://t.co/8XKgqvJYn2

Brookings Institution fellow Elaine Kamarck on Friday compared President Trump's rhetoric on immigration to "the boy who cried wolf. I think that the president at this point with immigration is like the boy who cried wolf," Kamarck, who also directs the Center for Effective Public Management, told Hill.TV's Jamal Simmons on "What America's Thinking."

What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”....“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual.